Читать книгу The Rat-Pit - Patrick MacGill - Страница 22
I
ОглавлениеTOWARDS the end of the following year a great event took place in Frosses. It was reported that a registered letter addressed to “James Ryan, Esquire, Meenalicknalore” was lying in Frosses post-office. Norah heard the news and spoke of it to her father.
“No one but your own self can get the letter,” she said. “That is what the people at the post-office say. You have to write your name down on white paper too, before the letter crosses the counter.”
“And is it me, a man who was never at school, that has to put down my name?” asked James Ryan in a puzzled voice.
“It will be a letter from the boy himself,” said the old woman, who was sitting up in bed and knitting. Now and again she placed her bright irons down and coughed with such violence as to shake her whole body. “And maybe there is money in the same letter. It is not often that we have a letter coming to us.”
“We had none since the last process for the rent and that was two years aback,” said the husband. “Maybe I will be going into Frosses and getting that letter myself now.”
“Maybe you would,” stammered his wife, still battling with her cough.
James Ryan put on his mairteens and left the house. Norah watched him depart, and her eyes followed him until he turned the corner of the road; then she went to the bedside and sitting on a low stool commenced to turn the heel of a long stocking.
“How many days to a day now is it since Fergus took the road to Derry?” asked the old woman. “I am sure it is near come nine months this very minute.”
“It is ten months all but sixteen days.”
“Under God the day and the night, and is it that?”
“That it is and every hour of it.”
“He will be across the whole flat world since he left,” said the mother, looking fixedly at an awkward, ungainly calf which had just blundered into the house, but seeing far beyond. “He will maybe send five pounds in gold in the letter.”
“Maybe. But you are not thinking of that, mother?” said Norah.
“And what would you be thinking of, then?” asked the old woman.
“I am wondering if he is in good health and happy.”
“The young are always happy, Norah. Are you not?”
“Sometimes. I am happy when out in the open, listening to the birds singing, and the wind running on the heather.”
“Who ever heard of a person listening to things like those? Are you not happy in God’s house on a Sunday?”
“Oh, I am happy there as well,” answered Norah, but there was a hint of hesitation in the answer.
“Everyone that is good of heart is happy in God’s house,” said the mother. “Have you turned the heel of the stocking yet?”
“I am nigh finished with the foot, mother.”
“My own two eyes are getting dim, and I cannot hurry like you these days,” said the woman in the bed. “Run those hens from the house, and the young sturk too.... I wonder what he is coming in here for now, the rascal?”
“Maybe he likes to be near the fire,” said the child, looking at the spotted calf that was nosing at a dish on the dresser. “When Micky’s Jim built a new byre it was not easy to keep the cattle in it, for they always wanted to get back into the warm house again.”
With these words she rose and chased the young animal out of doors, while a few stray hens fluttered wildly about in making their exit. “The cows like the blaze,” Norah went on as she came back and took up her seat by the fire. “Every evening they turn round and look at it, and you can see their big soft eyes shining through the darkness.”
“It is the strange things that you be noticing, alannah, but what you say is very true,” said the mother. “It will be a letter from Fergus, I suppose, with five gold guineas in it,” she went on. “Maybe he will be at the back of America by now.... If he sends five gold guineas we will make a holy nun of you, Norah, and then you can pray day and night with no one at all to ask you to do anything but that alone.”
“I might get tired of it, mother.”
“Son of Mary, listen to her! Tired of saying your prayers, you mean? There is that sturk at the door again. Isn’t he the rascal of the world?”
